Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

14 Thomas Elsaessergenre or a sub-genre. I prefer to think of them as a phenomenon, or maybe– in deference to François Truffaut – a “certain tendency” in contemporarycinema. But if it is a tendency, it does not point in one direction only;and if it is a phenomenon, what is it symptomatic of?First of all, a broad description of the mind-game film. It comprises moviesthat are “playing games,” and this at two levels: there are films in which acharacter is being played games with, without knowing it or withoutknowing who it is that is playing these (often very cruel and even deadly)games with him (or her): in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs(1991) the serial killer “Buffalo Bill” is playing games with the police (andthe women he captures) and Hannibal Lecter is playing games withClarice Starling (and eventually, she with him). In David Fincher’s Se7en(1995), John Doe, another serial killer, is playing games with the rookiepoliceman played by Brad Pitt. In Fincher’s The Game (1997), MichaelDouglas is the one who is being played games with (possibly by his ownbrother). In Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), the eponymous heroleads an entire life that for everyone else is a game, a stage-managed televisionshow, from which only Truman is excluded. Then, there are filmswhere it is the audience that is played games with, because certain crucialinformation is withheld or ambiguously presented: Bryan Singer’s TheUsual Suspects (1995), Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), Christopher Nolan’sMemento (2000), John Woo’s Paycheck (2003), John Maybury’s The Jacket(2005), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Dr. (2001) fallin this category. The information may be withheld from both charactersand audience, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) andAlejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), where the central protagonistsare already “dead, except [they] don’t know it yet,” to quote one of theopening lines of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999). Sometimes, the“masters” of the game reveal themselves (The Truman Show, Se7en), butmostly they do not, and at other times, a puppet master is caught up inhis own game, as in Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich(1999), the hypochondriac writer in the same team’s Adaptation (2002),or the two magicians in Nolan’s The Prestige (2006).Other films of the mind-game tendency put the emphasis on “mind”: theyfeature central characters whose mental condition is extreme, unstable, orpathological; yet instead of being examples of case studies, their ways ofseeing, interaction with other characters, and their “being in the world”are presented as normal. The films thus once more “play games” with theaudience’s (and the characters’) perception of reality: they oblige one to